Faith – According to Gregory Wolfe

* “…faith ought to make us feel less oppressed by decline, rather than more. The preoccupation with rise or fall now appears to me a projection of the perennial human temptation to live in the past or the future rather than the present. We live burdened by what we have lost or preoccupied with something we don’t have but need in order to be happy.

Faith, according to the letter to the Hebrews, is ‘the substance of things hoped for.’ That phrasing, from the King James Version, hasn’t been improved upon in recent translations. In faith, what is hoped for becomes present, substantial. To live in faith means to live in the present, to know that the substance of grace is here and now. That is not to say that faith involves some sort of simple possession; it is, rather, to exist in the tension between the presence we encounter and the sense of what that presence means for our destiny. As the critic George Steiner put it in Real Presences, we live on Holy Saturday, between the death and loss of Good Friday and the promise of resurrection on Easter Sunday…

…Marx called religion the opiate of the masses while offering the drug of happiness in some future revolution. Faith, far from making us apathetic, enables us to be present to what surrounds us. It also provides a sense of peace, which is always a better platform for action than anger or grievance. Saint Francis didn’t stand on a soapbox in Assisi hectoring the rich about the plight of the poor; he asked those who had bread to give him some and then he delivered it to those who didn’t. And you can be sure that as he did so, he didn’t feel important at all.”

*these are excerpts from Gregory Wolfe’s article, “Always Now”. You can check that out here. It is well worth the read. Gregory Wolfe is publisher and editor of Image journal.